Shared control of ship autopilots and human pilots for maritime autonomous surface ship in the presence of actuator anomalies

Abstract

This paper investigates the heading control problem of maritime autonomous surface ships (MASSs) in the presence of actuator anomalies. A shared control framework that includes a ship autopilot and a human pilot, is constructed to realize the accurate tracking of the time-varying command signals. Specifically, the human pilot is responsible for high-level decision making such as anomaly estimation, anomaly correction and monitoring analysis, and the ship autopilot is responsible for a low-level task of command following. With the proposed shared control framework, the ability of the ship autopilot can be significantly enhanced compared to entirely automated tracking. Through Lyapunov stability analysis, it is proven that the tracking error is ultimately bounded, while all the signals of the closed-loop system remain bounded. Finally, a simulation example is presented to prove the effectiveness of the proposed shared control architecture for MASSs under actuator anomalies.

Keywords:

• Maritime autonomous surface ships
• shared control
• heading control
• actuator failures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 51979020, 51909021, 51939001, 52071044], and in part by the Top-notch Young Talents Program of China, and in part by the Liaoning Revitalization Talents Program [grant number XLYC2007188], and in part by Science and Technology Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of Dalian [grant number 2018RJ08], and in part by the Supporting Program for High-level Technical Talent in Transportation [grant number 2018-030], and in part by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation 2019M650086, and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant numbers 3132019319 and 3132021109].